Wings Over Scotland

At FMQs today, Douglas Ross announced that he was putting down a motion of no confidence in the Scottish Government in the wake of the collapse of the Bute House agreement. That creates an enormously interesting situation, because the arithmetic of Parliament is extremely finely balanced, and particularly in the light of Patrick Harvie’s subsequent contribution.

In short, what it means is that the future of the government hangs on Ash Regan.

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We tweeted this last night as a teaser for our big exclusive. (Which is now hilariously being claimed by Paul Hutcheon of the Daily Record seven hours later.)

And it does now seem to be the case that the news is that the SNP are ending the Bute House Agreement and kicking out the Greens before the Greens do it first.

And what that tells us, for a starter, is that the SNP’s once-legendary skill in news management really is now well and truly on fire, as in “bin”.

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News reaches Wings this evening that Humza Yousaf has called an emergency meeting of the Scottish Cabinet at 10 o’clock tomorrow morning, just a couple of hours before FMQs. (This information has been confirmed directly to us by a source very close to a member of said Cabinet.)

An emergency Cabinet meeting is an extraordinarily rare event. As far as we’re able to establish there have only been two during the SNP’s time in power – when the budget failed to pass in 2009 and Alex Salmond’s administration had to decide whether or not to trigger a general election, and one the day after the Brexit vote to supposedly plan a second indyref (LOL). But in any case they’re extremely unusual.

The subject of the meeting has not been disclosed to us. It could, for example, concern imminent developments in Operation Branchform, or it could relate to the Bute House Agreement between the SNP and the Scottish Greens. The men in grey kilts may have come for the FM. Or Scotland could be about to declare war on Morocco or something. But we are told that the fact of the meeting taking place is a 100% certainty.

So no sleeping in tomorrow, readers. It’s probably going to be big.

Daniel Sanderson of the Telegraph has filed a series of excellent but deeply disturbing articles this month about the growing presence in Scottish primary schools of LGBT Youth Scotland, a charity which has been heavily involved in not one but two serious child abuse scandals, one of them the most horrific in Scottish history.

But LGBTYS seems to be able to do whatever it wants.

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While we all wait for the thing we all really want to happen this week, try to pretend that the disastrous and pitiful “indy march and rally” at the weekend never took place, and do our best to ignore the fact that thanks to the weakness of Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf our country’s government is infested with lunatic extremist child-abuse apologists, let’s see if we can’t take some time out from all the doom and gloom to offer something constructive.

Not you, Patrick. This is for grown-ups, you can sit it out on your wee high chair.

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There are, at the most generous possible maximum estimate, maybe 1600 people here, including the wee knot of 100 or so Unionists circled at bottom left.

That is now the size of the self-styled “mainstream independence movement”.

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The pause button has been released. The day is finally here.

And it’s one that EVERY supporter of independence should rejoice in.

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We unreservedly applaud the swiftness with which the office of the Official Report of the Scottish Parliament have delivered this answer, something which other bodies in Scotland could learn from.

(Click pic to enlarge.)

The content of it, however, is more disturbing.

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Correct us if we’re wrong, but isn’t this guy:

…the same man who LITERALLY just passed a law dividing Scotland into groups of people who are worthy of protection from hatred and those who aren’t? (Most notably women and people who know what sex they are.)

Is he, then, a “bad faith actor”? Maybe we misunderstood.

Truth matters in public life.

So we’ve sent the letter below to the Scottish Parliament this morning.

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Now, before we start this piece we should probably note that we don’t think anyone’s losing anything by being excluded from Believe In Scotland’s latest money-gathering exercise (folding, please, not clinking!) in Glasgow later this month. We rather suspect most folk can manage fine without spending a Saturday afternoon listening to tedious speeches from Pat Kane, Ross Greer and Iona Fyfe.

But this is still disturbing:

Because for a party which pretty much never mentions Scottish independence, which conspicuously removed the word “INDEPENDENCE” from their conference banner last week, and which stated just days ago that independence wouldn’t be any sort of red line preventing them doing a coalition deal with Scottish Labour, to be able to effectively veto the participation of ACTUAL independence parties from (ostensibly) independence rallies is a strange state of affairs indeed.

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